[Edu-sig] Writing presentation manager for OSCON, in Pygame

[Dethe Elza]

Best wishes on your presentation, Kirby!

At the Vancouver Python Conference last year, Paul Prescod joked that  
I was the only one writing my own presentation software.  I also used  
PyGame, but in my case each "slide" was a mini-game (or game-in- 
progress).  I'll note that it was the last time I ever used PyGame  
and I would have abandoned it sooner if I hadn't committed to doing a  
presentation about it.  It reminded me of doing programming on the  
Mac in the 68K days, when you had to write your own main loop, your  
own event management, etc.  Very primitive.  If I need slide-show  
type presentations these days, I tend to go with S5[1] using Safari  
or Firefox.

On the other hand, the next presentation I did for Paul (at the  
VanPyZ monthly meeting last February), I wrote the presentation  
software using Cocoa (OS X framework), Python, XML, and Renaissance  
(framework for turning XML into Cocoa UI).  So perhaps I am a glutton  
for punishment.

--Dethe

[1] http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/

On 18-Jul-05, at 11:18 AM, Kirby Urner wrote:

>
> Sort of relevant to the queries below, I'm developing source  
> materials for
> my upcoming presentation at OSCON 2005.  I've determined that using  
> closed
> source presentation software i.e. PowerPoint, would not be  
> appropriate to
> this venue (smart me, huh?), and furthermore, using Impress or other
> OpenOffice-like PPT clone wouldn't be sufficiently Pythonic.  Ergo,  
> I'm
> writing my own presentation management software in Pygame.
>
> The basic structure is an outer event loop driven by keystrokes (no  
> mouse)
> and rather few of them at that (left/right arrow, Stop, Restart,  
> Pause,
> Unpause).  Class definitions define slide content in terms of various
> resources:  Autoflipimage, Movieplayer, Scrolltextfile, Stillimage  
> and so
> on.  Each slide is composed by a function, which calls the necessary
> parameters on the resources, all of which get sent as a list to a  
> Scene
> object, which actually operates the content objects at runtime  
> (e.g. by
> passing through keystrokes).
>
> Resources with internal dynamism (e.g. an Autoflipimage or MPEG  
> movie clip)
> get their own threads, i.e. are subclassed from threading.Thread  
> (plus an
> interface-like mixin).  This is necessary to keep the outmost  
> keystroke
> thread alive to the keyboard (it wouldn't do to get sucked into a  
> resource
> and have to sit through a boring MPEG, even if you were ready to  
> move on).
>
> In other words, I've leveraging that I know how to code, to cut  
> right to the
> runtime display engine, completely bypassing / ignoring any need  
> for GUI
> tools to define and structure the slides at design time.  That's  
> all done
> "programmatically" as they say -- which is too much work for most  
> office
> cubies, but is far less work than coding a design time GUI, if  
> you're a
> one-man-year-per-year type shop (my shop is somewhat more than  
> that, but
> this OSCON thing I'm doing on my own time).
>
> I'm going to upload all this stuff with the GPL once my talk is  
> done.  I
> want the first venue (the showcase debut) to be at OSCON itself  
> (first week
> in August, here in PDX).
>
> On my next Saturday Academy gig, I'll plan to keep using this Python +
> Pygame solution, as I'll be able to guide 'em around the source code,
> illustrating how one can do a lot with Python in < 1K lines of code.
>
> Kirby
>
>
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: edu-sig-bounces at python.org [mailto:edu-sig- 
>> bounces at python.org] On
>> Behalf Of Peter Bowyer
>> Sent: Saturday, July 09, 2005 2:58 AM
>> To: edu-sig at python.org
>> Subject: [Edu-sig] SOT: authoring course material
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> As I sit down to write my course material I was wondering - what  
>> software
>> do you use?  Traditionally material in the physics department has  
>> always
>> been written in LaTeX (uugh), with a printed copy given to the  
>> student,
>> and
>> a PDF of the printed copy available online.
>>
>> I need to produce a printable set of notes, but would also like to  
>> do a
>> true web-based version.  We've talked about testing the students with
>> online multiple-choice quizzes and I'm keen to have expandable  
>> sections of
>> the notes online (so the more advanced students don't have to read  
>> the
>> basics, but can see advanced questions the others cannot).   
>> However, from
>> past experience if there are not full printed notes there will be
>> complaints, and as the computers aren't dual-monitor it would be  
>> hard to
>> read online notes while working.
>>
>> What have you found works when teaching introductory programming?
>>
>> Also, have you found tools such as wikis useful when either  
>> developing the
>> teaching material or writing the following report?
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Peter
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Edu-sig mailing list
>> Edu-sig at python.org
>> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Edu-sig mailing list
> Edu-sig at python.org
> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
>


Life is extinct on other planets.  Their scientists were more  
advanced than ours. --Mark Russell

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: smime.p7s
Type: application/pkcs7-signature
Size: 2488 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://mail.python.org/pipermail/edu-sig/attachments/20050718/884c9561/smime.bin